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Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

Salty - True, and it helps if you know Sign Language. It gets you quite accustomed to taking in information through the eyes, and helps you "Hear" when the message is not "loud". Anyone can have good observation skills, I just notice that my Deaf friends all are exceptionally good at it. I could consider myself to be "lucky" - I'm hard of hearing enough to know Sign Language, and can hear enough to talk with most people, especially ones who speak slow and clear.

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

I joined a local beekeeping association and only seem to be criticized from one of the leaders of the group. they had a tbh and lost it over the winter they decided to do away with it and now don't seem to want to have anything to do with them. they also lost 3 langs that same winter. I was hoping to find a mentor to help me succeed with my hobby. i will look for a new group to join and read a lot to help me learn.

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

Heck I wouldn't caste them aside too quickly, I'm not familiar with your area but generally there are not a lot of Top Bar groups.

The guy cannot be too bigoted or he would not have got a TBH in the first place. However sounds like he is not your guy but just look for someone who knows bees.

First TBH's I was involved with, I never read any books on them but I do know bees, I was able to get excellent results by top bar standards and help others do the same. It's more about knowing bees rather than all the drivel that gets talked about why this or that hive design is better.

Figure out who in the group is successful with their bees, and out of them find one who is not too prejudiced to help you and is willing to. For me I didn't find working with TBH's hard at all.

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

I made one TBH along with a lang just to see what they are like. To put it simple I prefer the lang. But that is me. I see where the next guy woudl favor the TBH. That is all well and good. but the limitations and disadvantages of both are real. As long as the TBH hive holds up I have decided to use it to harvest cut comb honey. Easy to get into , No heavy lifting. Super easy to find the queen and inspect the brood nest and I find it far less necessary to do so. Harder to get put back together when the bees are all over the place but inspections still take far less time. I think it makes a great learning tool but is not as adaptable as the lang as the colony progresses.

The lang has a huge disadvantage particularly to the beginner in the fact it is adaptable. proper management of that adaptability is not always easy you can make it bigger you can make it smaller. but knowing just when to which is not always easy. Plus it's components come in a wide variety. everything from varied sizes of boxes to specialized bottom boards. feeders. covers. excluders. includers. and you name it. I am waiting for the revolving door entrance to be made. All of this not only leads to confusion in equipment selection but an abundance of excess and sometimes unnecessary equipment. Lang present a storage issue that TBH's do not have. you put the equipment back in the hive with a TBH. when all those huge boxes of honey come off a lang. you have to have a place to keep them until next year.

To ,me all beekeeping equipment has that feel that it was derived from the trash laying around when the person tried to design it. just because they are production made now does not change the fact they where basically barely make due designs. The TBH directly falls into that category. the very reason it was made was for people that have nothing to make hives from. The design of the lang was determined more by the dimensions of tossed out apple crates than the needs of the bees or the beekeeper. I have never seen any serious consideration of the impact that the completely unnatural expansion and contraction of the hive has on bees. I suspect ti cannot be good. I do see alto of comments on how good it is not on the backs of beekeepers to lift a deep of honey. Yet they still make them that big. TI is fairly common knowledge that bees will build the nest either near the entrance to the hive or at the tip of it. yet the lang hive will both. move the entrance around on the bees in some cases. and locate the nest at the bottom of the colony. I have read that bees will move up in winter and back down in the summer. I have not found this to be true. but that the bees work there way around the hive in a circle. A barrel woudl be more suitable to bees than a box. it is also tremendously inconvenient to have the brood nest under hundreds of lbs of honey. Yet a solution has never been found for that yet.

I have heard at times that queenless bees will produce more honey because they do not expend resources on rearing brood. yet not one honey production management method includes removing the bees from their queen. not even for a short period of time.

Where is the thought processes that lead to innovation? Buried under centuries of "This is how it has always been done"? They used to bleed people to remove the bad blood also. somewhere along the line they gave that up. I believe the lang hive should have been given up long ago also. That it is not is a testament that beekeeping is going nowhere fast. and has been doing so for a very long time. So do it any way you choose. but most of all try not to do it any way anyone else has ever tried. I don't think many of them are doing it very well anyway. They are doing it so bad that they make headlines regularly.

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

Originally Posted by Daniel Y

I have heard at times that queenless bees will produce more honey because they do not expend resources on rearing brood. yet not one honey production management method includes removing the bees from their queen. not even for a short period of time.
.

Sounds like a recipe for drone layers.

“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled.” - The Quran

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

Originally Posted by Daniel Y

I believe the lang hive should have been given up long ago also. That it is not is a testament that beekeeping is going nowhere fast. and has been doing so for a very long time. So do it any way you choose. but most of all try not to do it any way anyone else has ever tried.

While I am a very new beekeeper, and my only two hives are both TBHes, I am curious as to what you may have been working on to follow your own advice. What sort of "thinking outside of the Langstroth box" have you been doing?

As you've pointed out, the Langs have been in use for well over a hundred years. During that time the changes appear to have been confined primarily to refining the basic idea--plastic foundation, different sized supers, 8-frame instead of 10, that sort of thing. Management of the Langs has evolved to incorporate the new problems such as mites and beetles, with other refinements as experience has added to the general knowledge. In the end, it's still the same basic boxes with the same basic principles.

So why is that? Is it because Langstroth got the basics right even if he did start with orange crates because they were handy? Is it because any additional complexity would make a hive too expensive or no be doable because of the bees themselves? Is it because in all this time no one has had an "Aha!" moment where an idea crystalized into something revolutionary? Is it because the Langs have proven to be the most efficient at honey production and coincidentally easy to secure for trucking across the US for polination? Or is is simply because it works, so why mess with success?

I was going to add regulations to the mix, but my impression is that the biggie when it comes to hives is to be able to inspect each frame, and that seems to me to be a capability any innovator would want to incorporate anyway so I discarded it.

Don't get me wrong--I don't disagree with the idea that the current situation may not be sustainable or that there might be a better way. But it is a very complex issue, and in the end we may find that for its purpose the basic Lang is indeed the most effective hive available and will continue to be so as long as the goals are maximize honey production and provide polinators.

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

Originally Posted by shannonswyatt

If you feed it frames of open brood you can stop the impulse for the workers to start laying.

Think about what you just said.

We take away the quieen so there wlll not be any brood for the workers to care for.... then we add brood back in.... hmmm... something does not make sense.... anyway... guess we can go through the hives everyday cutting out QCs....

“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled.” - The Quran

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

You wouldn't need a ton of brood to keep the girls from starting to lay. If the brood is over a day old they can't make queen cells from it, but the brood will still be releasing pheromones. I've never done this, I've just read about it.

Re: Ever encountered hostility from other beekeepers over your TBH?

Good point. Eggs hatch into brood. Brood that is under two days old can be raised into a queen.

Like I said before, I never did the whole remove queen method of making more honey, I just read about it. I know a lot of folks would remove any queen cells that are developed if you put in young brood.